The last message to family and friends from Tyrelle D. Shaw, an artist and bow-tie designer who called himself “Mr. Talented,” arrived at 1:38 p.m. on June 16.

“Surprisingly, I saw my afterlife!” he wrote on Facebook. “If I’m correct- I should be reincarnated into a Rat. Guess what? Your life after death already exist. It’s just waiting for you to die. I know! I know! People call me weird, but I’m actually Brilliant.”

The distressing note, in which Mr. Shaw said he planned to take his own life, signified the beginning of the end of a vicious crime spree that had terrified an entire community in New York. It also represented the climax of what the Police Department’s chief of detectives would later describe as “one of the strangest stories” he had encountered in some time.

Over the previous six days, a man had attacked at least four women in Manhattan, smashing them in the face with a heavy object wrapped in a plastic bag. The common thread in the seemingly random attacks: All of the victims were of Asian descent.

The attacks and the resulting manhunt for Mr. Shaw, identified through a surveillance video, spread fear in Chinatown and other Asian enclaves across the city.

In one of the episodes, the police said, the man complained to his victim that Asian women would not talk to him. But could such a thing really explain the assaults?

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Mr. Shaw with the actor Russell Crowe in a photograph posted on Mr. Shaw’s blog.

What happened next would also shock: Mr. Shaw said on his blog that he planned to place his neck in a noose tied to an elevator at the bottom of a shaft. The next person who pushed a button to send the elevator up would, he wrote, “murder me without even knowing it.”

Days later, his body was found. It was a sad, violent end to a short, promising life. On his blog, he had admitted to the attacks and had blamed being rejected by Asian women for committing them. He had tried to talk to nearly 1,500 in less than 350 days, he wrote, and none had said hello: “I just couldn’t understand why Asian Women didn’t find me attractive.”

A friend recalled Mr. Shaw saying he had been found to have bipolar disorder, but could not afford the medicine to treat it. Mental health records obtained by The New York Times from 2013, when he was in jail on Rikers Island, did not show him reporting any manic symptoms, only a history of depression.

Regardless, Mr. Shaw lived two lives. In the real one, which he rarely discussed, his mother had abandoned him as a child, family members said. He spent his teenage years in a boarding home. He squatted as an adult in storage areas and the basements of buildings on a seven-block stretch of the Upper East Side. He spent months in jail for petty crimes. In the fictional one, which he shared with most people, he was from Canada. He disappeared for months at a time because he was traveling the world. He rubbed shoulders with famous people.

“That’s why we thought he was so nice, because he was from Canada,” said Holton Desprez, 25, who met Mr. Shaw in 2008. “I felt he was a wealthy black kid, that he was really doing well.”

Mr. Shaw veered between flights of grandiosity and litanies of perceived slights. In addition to calling himself “Mr. Talented,” he renamed himself Augustus, the title used by Rome’s first emperor. He wrote that he could potentially cure cancer. He obsessed over a woman calling him a “goofball.” He complained about people mistreating him. “I fight with my brain,” he wrote in a self-published book, really more of an essay, titled “Mr. Talented’s Goofball Ideas.”

Yet for most of his 25 years, Mr. Shaw seemed incapable of any kind of violence. His was supposed to be the rare story in which a child who grows up in a broken home does not end up as a broken adult.

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Mr. Shaw’s belongings outside the Madison Avenue apartment this month.CreditAndrew Renneisen for The New York Times

Born to two deaf parents who split up soon afterward, he spent his early years in the South Bronx and the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. His mother abandoned him after her own mother died, family members said. He eventually landed in foster care, trying at one point to jump out a window when a foster parent allegedly tried to abuse him, mental health records show.

When he was about 12, he moved to Children’s Village, a boarding home for at-risk children in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. He lived there for five years, eventually obtaining scholarships to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2007.

“He was full of personality and charm and a certain kind of elegance,” said Taur Orange, the college’s director of Educational Opportunity Programs, which help poor students succeed. “At the same time, from Day 1, I could see he was fragile.”

To his friends, he seemed to have things together. He lived in the dorms. He was a preppy ladies’ man who hung out with the basketball team. He told friends that the easiest way to pick up women was to compliment them. He was not particular about race.

“Every time I was with him, he always had a girl,” said Tarik Payton, 25, a basketball player and one of Mr. Shaw’s closest friends. “He was never struggling in the women department.”

Mr. Shaw talked big, and lived big. He won attention for his cleverly designed bow ties, which he made from dice and Scrabble-like tiles from the game Bananagrams to spell words like “imagination” and “outstanding.” Somehow, he managed to get his creations onto the necks of celebrities like Adam Sandler — although some of his celebrity tales might have been exaggerated. (He also told a friend that the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. had paid him $10,000 for a bow tie.) His painting style, he liked to say, was “100 percent power.”

“What can we say, the man’s got swagger,” said a story about Mr. Shaw published in August 2012 by the Foster Care to Success program, a nonprofit group that helped him get financial aid for college.

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The actor Nick Cannon with Mr. Shaw, wearing a bow tie that Mr. Shaw had designed.

At some point, he became fixated on Asian culture and Asian women. He invited Mr. Payton to drink bubble tea in 2012, saying it was very popular in China and Japan. “He was saying I want to learn Japanese, so I can talk to more Asian women,” Mr. Payton recalled.

Instead of Mr. Talented, another young man started to emerge, one who did stupid things, like stealing a leather jacket valued at almost $1,500 from Bloomingdale’s, or stealing four pairs of sunglasses from the BCBG Max Azria store on Madison Avenue.

He also lied. Two years ago, Mr. Shaw told a friend he was moving back home to Toronto. But he spent much of the period from June 2013 to June 2014 on Rikers Island after being convicted of stealing the sunglasses, as well as an iPad from a hair salon and an iPhone from the front seat of an ambulance.

He was arrested again in December, this time for trespassing, after he was found in a storage room in a building at 696 Madison Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He spent only a day in jail.

Those who knew him said he had changed. Nia Langley, who met Mr. Shaw through social media, said he was “very giving, very open, very artistic,” that is, at least until the beginning of this year. She said he started posting “weird stuff” online — about being rejected by women, about how he felt as a black man, about how he thought Asians were racist.

Still, he kept trying to sell his bow ties, assembling them at coffee shops for hours at a time, sometimes while wearing a silver spacesuit or a graduation gown, workers said.

Not even family members knew where he lived. Seen sneaking in and out of buildings on Madison Avenue for months, he was probably homeless. At one point, he seemed to have moved into apartment 5F at 696 Madison Avenue, near 62nd Street, and put his name on the mailbox. This month, just before the attacks began, boxes and bags filled with his possessions — bills, unfinished bow ties, name tags with a slash drawn through the word “sex,” a dictionary of psychology — were left outside the apartment’s front door.

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Surveillance footage of Mr. Shaw, which was released when he was wanted in a string of recent attacks on Asian women in Manhattan.CreditNYPD

In a missive later posted on his blog, Mr. Shaw wrote that he had spent a weekend in early June trying to pick up Asian women unsuccessfully. “I’ve been rejected so much I feel absolutely numb,” he wrote. He announced a plan to “hit over a million Asian Women in the face with a stick.”

His first attack came on June 10, the police said, when he struck a woman in the face with what appears to have been a hammer wrapped in a plastic bag. The last attack came on June 15, around 4 p.m., when he hit a woman working at a dry-cleaning shop after showing her a sexually suggestive message in Chinese on his cellphone. She is still too terrified to return to work, her employer said.

That night, Mr. Shaw had dinner with a female friend of Asian descent at a barbecue restaurant in Manhattan. She did not want to be named because she did not want to be linked to him.

As he ate chicken and biscuits, Mr. Shaw made awkward conversation. He said he would no longer frequent Asian restaurants, because they served him 20 minutes after everyone else. He said he was going to earn money, $1,500 a month, by selling his sperm. He said he wanted to file a malpractice lawsuit against a nurse who had botched the job earlier in the day when she took his blood. He complained about a world he felt was against him because he was a black man.

The woman wondered why Mr. Shaw, typically happy and positive, was being so negative. She also wondered what was in the FedEx package he was carrying. Whatever it was, it looked unusual.

The next day, Mr. Shaw posted his suicide notes, on Facebook first, and later on his blog. Almost a week later, on June 22, his decomposing body was found at the bottom of an elevator shaft in a building on Madison Avenue. He was wearing a silver spacesuit and had a noose around his neck. The other part of the rope was still tied to the elevator.

At his feet lay a bag, a hammer inside.

Michael Schwirtz and Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: How a Life That Showed Promise Veered Into Violence, Then Death. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe